Children’s Mental Health Week interview: How to teach children resilience

For Children's Mental Health Week, we spoke to educational psychologist, certified play therapist and BPS Division of Educational Psychology Committee member, Dr Melernie Meheux about how she supports children to be resilient and overcome any obstacles they face.

Can you tell me about your work with children and young people?

I'm an educational psychologist and currently work in a mental health support team and have had various mental health related roles within Educational Psychology Services. Emotional wellbeing and mental health have always been an interest of mine.

The theme for this year's Children's Mental Health Week is 'Know yourself, grow yourself' and focuses on how we can teach children to build resilience. How do you teach the children you support to be more resilient?

It's a theme that runs through our work. Our focus is on psychological safety and making sure that children feel safe in schools so they can make the best possible progress. Part of that is helping them develop their resilience. 

Resilience is something that you teach and promote, but it's also something that you model in schools. So, for example, a school may come to me and say, 'I've got a child who is really struggling with things that are happening at home and it's impacting their learning'. Resilience will be an underlying theme for them, so you focus on learning what the challenges they're facing are, but you'll also focus on the environment around the child. This includes teachers, their friendships and helping to promote a sense of belonging. I think resilience is embedded in all the work that we do.

Can you give an example of how you might teach a child to be more resilient?

I often work with young people who've been excluded or are at risk of exclusion. If their placement is due to break down, they're not getting on with their friends or they're getting into trouble in the community, the way that I would instil a sense of belonging or get them to think about resilience, is working with them to look at what the challenges they face are and how they can respond.

We talk about how they manage conflicts and how they respond to their emotions so that they can navigate a difficult situation in the future and develop a sense of resilience. It means they can cope when life gets difficult. This could be coping with big issues like navigating school during the pandemic, their parents separating, or going through a bereavement or loss.

It can also be coping with what people might think are minor things like moving from secondary school to sixth form and not being sure how to manage it. 

Why do you think it's important for children to learn from an early age to be resilient?

Life is continually changing. You cope with and navigate change every single day. It can be something small like changing the train you normally get. But it can also be the big life events, like losing people or your parents separating.

I think resilience helps you cope with these life events because it essentially teaches you how you cope with and adjust to change. I think if children aren't prepared for that then life can be quite difficult, because life is unpredictable. 

Can you think of a time when you've seen a child become more resilient and it's had a positive impact on their school life or their relationships?

When I've worked with children who are living with a foster family or a carer and they need to move schools, the transition, although still difficult is less challenging, than it would be, when we put things in place to promote resilience over time. 

Sometimes, actions that a school takes to help children transition to their new school can be really helpful. Things like preparing a child by telling them the name of their teacher or showing them pictures of the school so that it feels more familiar to them. I think that adults have a responsibility to promote resilience in young children.

Also, it's helpful when adults name emotions and say things like, 'I'm wondering if you're feeling worried about going to school. I imagine if that was me, I would be'. I think normalising the feelings around change in that situation and having open and honest conversations is really helpful.

What advice would you give to an adult or a carer who wants to help a child become more resilient?

Think about how you model coping with change and difficulty. Do you respond in a way that's rational and reasonable? Say, for example, your cooker isn't working today, and you recognise that you're frustrated as it means that you can't make dinner. 

If you're resilient, the first thing you think is, 'How can I adapt to this? I'm going to call someone to come and fix it, and then I'm going to make sure that we've got an alternative means of having dinner.'

You model naming emotions and being able to show an example like, 'It's frustrating me that the cooker isn't working, but I'm going to persevere and get on with things'. You don't model being overly upset and distressed over small life events. However, there's a time and a place for those emotions. If a child loses someone, you show that loss and you recognise the upset. You then model how you overcome and manage it.